Noam Chomsky: Trump could stage a ‘false flag’ terror attack and ‘change the country instantly’

Author and political philosopher Noam Chomsky sounded a dire warning on Monday in an interview with AlterNet’s Jan Frel, saying that President Donald Trump could stage a “false flag” terror attack in an effort to consolidate his power and strip Americans of their constitutional rights.

Chomsky warned that eventually the people who voted for Trump will realize that his “promises are built on sand” and begin to lose faith in his presidency, at which point Trump will need someone to scapegoat, so he will say, “‘Well, I’m sorry, I can’t bring your jobs back because these bad people are preventing it.’ And the typical scapegoating goes to vulnerable people: immigrants, terrorists, Muslims and elitists, whoever it may be. And that can turn out to be very ugly.”

“I think that we shouldn’t put aside the possibility that there would be some kind of staged or alleged terrorist act, which can change the country instantly,” Chomsky said.

Using drones to kill American citizens without trial, collecting the email and phone records of millions of Americans on a daily basis, and grabbing militants off of the streets of foreign cities and imprisoning them indefinitely — these are all powers that Obama has bequeathed to his successor.

Presidents George W. Bush and Obama both dramatically expanded the power and authority of the executive branch, particularly in the realm of national security. In addition to having nearly unlimited power to start wars without Congress’s approval, presidents now have the power to order drone strikes on US citizens abroad without charges or trial, gather millions of Americans’ emails and phone records with minimal judicial oversight, and radically redefine what does and does not constitute “torture” without fear of ever being prosecuted for war crimes.